Bernie White Hatcher

Bernie is an acrylic painter whose work has focused on her expanding connections and changing impressions concerning landscape. Currently, she lives in both Illinois and New Mexico, but grew up in Wisconsin, Ohio, Missouri and Illinois. The art she creates is dependent on major influences over the years and has shifted and altered from time to time. Ultimately, she returns to the landscape, with its vast meanings and various representations.

Bernie received a bachelor’s and master’s degree in communications with emphasis on studio art and arts management. Her career has been art related, though varied. She worked as a draftsman and drafting foreman producing scaled drawings of cable and equipment for Bell Telephone, managed graphic arts and illustration at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine and was adjunct faculty in Arts & Education, at Lincoln Land Community College, in Springfield, Illinois. Fine art has been her love, and she has always continued to paint and exhibit. Her work is in galleries, businesses, corporations and private collections.

Artist statement

Landscape, the intrinsic nature of it, has always been the force behind my drive to create. As the years have rolled by, my landscape paintings have changed considerably. Time has an influence on all things – attitudes, growth rates, fashion, philosophies, science, technology, art and so on. All evolves and change occurs. So too my sense of landscape. It has deepened, and with that the parameters that traditionally defined it for me expanded. I accepted “landscape” in different terms. I saw beginnings, change and adaptation, disturbances and competition, destruction and decay. I saw extinction, innovation, growth and renewal. In order to communicate these constructs visually, my artwork evolved.

Stylistically my paintings have become a synthesis that blends vague forms of representation with expressionism and abstraction. In some of my pieces there is reference to a “horizon line,” sometimes a familiarity of shape. However, my paintings are more spontaneous with greater attention to texture, brushwork and scratching, impulsive line-work, colors that create friction, but also work towards harmony – all suggestive of a broadened sense of landscape. I now paint what are unplanned, intuitive responses to the metaphors I have experienced and have seen in the surrounding landscape.